A Huge No. Of Boxing Day Sign-Ups Caused Alexa To Crash On Christmas As Its Servers Were Overloaded

Christmas is celebrated globally and pretty much marks the end of the year. Everyone is in a relaxed mood, schedules are filled with holidays and everyone just wants to relax. Seems like the holiday season now extends to "artificial" beings as well.

Amazon's Echo smart speakers went down across the network on Christmas Day, with thousands of people reporting that the company's artificial intelligence assistant Alexa appeared to have gone on a festive break.

Amazon recently reported that it had sold "tens of millions" of the Echo range of smart speakers powered by the company's AI assistant Alexa. It's simple to conclude, a lot of people opened their presents in the morning, fired up the speaker and asked it way too many questions. It's natural for all of us to play around a maximum time when the gadget is new, and this flood of new users downed the servers.

Thanks to the tens of thousands, or maybe even millions of commands coming in from all over the globe, the system just couldn't handle it. Even Alexa had it with humans and decided to be Absent Without Leave (AWOL), and I'm sure HR folks at Amazon weren't very excited about it.

Multilingual Alexa, who has more than 70,000 different skills, told over 100 million jokes in 2018, but people were less than impressed with her Christmas day stunt. Rather than give the desired response, when the system crashed at about 10 am, Alexa said: "Sorry, I'm having trouble understanding you right now."

Though, the system was slowly back on track by the end of the afternoon. Replying to a query on Twitter, Amazon said they were aware of the issue and a technical team would resolve it within 12-24 hours.

The Amazon Echo speaker has a ring on the top, it usually is blue in colour, but turned red on Christmas Day. This obviously, wasn't planned to match along with the festival, but a sign that Alexa is unable to connect with the server successfully.

The system wasn't globally down as many users in the U.S.A reported no issues while the most affected seem to be UK and Italy. The Amazon Echo Dot was Amazon's most popular gift in the lead up to the holidays.